Heartbreak is so Much Better than Numb

I have witnessed many humans traversing through life with a solid dead stare. The hurts, habits, and hangups have all become too much, so they've numbed and settled into the routine swell of solemn slavery. Whatever it is, they feel like they have to keep going.

I don't want to disrespect this type of stability. It is certainly valuable to trudge through what must be endured.

But let's be clear that there is another way to live. The other path perhaps feels sadder, because it requires facing those hurts, habits, and hangups with ego-crushing humility. It means falling face down in front of yourself and actually feeling the failures that come with living in this world as a human. Sometimes it means flat out giving up--perhaps the greatest sin in our pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps culture.

It means dying to the idea that you can do it all, overcome it all, conquer it all. It means owning your limitations and identifying your weakness and walking forward in voluntary vulnerability rather than steady-state self-protection. This is a spiritual death. It makes way for a complete transformation in the audience of a God who makes up the vast difference.

You can't know what it feels like to be loved in the midst of heartbreak until it happens to you. Your choice is not whether or not you are loved, but whether or not you engage the heartbreak. Leaning into that reality of anguish and despair, crying out with your whole soul is so much better than staying numb.

Maybe the truly hardest part of living so bravely in the midst of heartbreak is that it keeps happening! Once you've stepped in, the opportunity to be hurt again just keeps showing up. Every single time it does you get the choice again to lean in with your whole heart or walk away slightly more numb. What will you choose?